The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs – a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this ...

A new method to estimate sexual dimorphism in fossil species near the base of our family tree has been just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), through the joint ...

Hominid refers to the family of primates that includes all species on the “human ” side of the evolutionary tree after the split from chimpanzees.. Two reports on the extraordinary discovery appeared ...

A series of new fossil discoveries in the 1990s generated great interest among scientists involved in research into human origins, pushing the date for the beginnings of bipedalism back to more than 4 ...

Paleontologists searching the bleak desert of central Ethiopia have unearthed the fossilized bones of a 5.5 million-year-old creature that appears to be the oldest human ancestor yet discovered. The ...

Kent State University Professor of Anthropology Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy. Lovejoy was among several authors who revealed findings today of Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominid species that lived 4.4 million ...

The most primitive hominid yet found, this species has more chimpanzee-like features than any other human ancestor. Ardipithecus ramidus may have walked upright. Other fossils discovered with A.

The skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient fossil dubbed "Ardi," is radically changing our ideas about mankind's origins. Kent State University's C. Owen Lovejoy says Ardi shows our ancestors ...

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly found fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have ...

WASHINGTON - Fossils have long provided snapshots of the human family tree, but a new find in Africa gives scientists a kind of mini home movie showing man's primal development. Because the ...